Treat every moment as your last.
It is not a preparation for something else.
Shunryu Suzuki-roshi
Tag: Mindfulness
Aware of patterns
We all have well-established habits of thought, emotion, reaction and judgement,
and without the keen awareness of practice, we’re just acting out these patterns.
When they arise, we’re not aware they’ve arisen.
We get lost in them, identify with them, act on them
— so much of our life is just acting out patterns.
Joseph Goldstein
A way of working with stress
Can you accept the moments of anger and fear as guests,
be willing to receive them with kindness
without feeling obliged to serve them a five-course meal?
Christina Feldman
Meeting ourselves
For us to be free, we need to stop believing the thoughts that something is wrong. We need to stop running away from the very vulnerability that needs a profound type of self-compassion. Whatever we cannot embrace with love or with acceptance imprisons us. It keeps us in the trance of a bad self. So the path of emotional healing is really the path of stopping the war, of pausing, of not believing the judgments, of not continuing to punish ourself. Instead of running away and trying to escape the rawness that is here, really meeting it with a deep, deep compassion.
Tara Brach, Meditations for Emotional Healing
Nowhere to go
Where is there a place for you to be? No place.
Nothing outside you can give you any place.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
You needn’t look at the sky because
it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it.
You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards
into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
If there was any Fall, look there,
if there was any Redemption, look there,
and if you expect any Judgment, look there,
because they all three will have to be in your time
and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
Flannery O Connor, Wise Blood
Fears leave
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Wendell Berry
photo chris reynolds
